Monthly Archive for October, 2004

The boards.ie Gospel According to St. Amp

Published on 29/10/2004 in Boards. 1 Comment

Thanks to Adam for his Wikipedia boards.ie article:

History of Boards.ie

Officially the boards.ie went live as a separate website in 2000 although it had been operating on the Irish Gaming Networks domain at least as far back as February 1998. It originally consisted of one forum to enable discussion of the iD Software game Quake and acted as a hub for the Irish Quake playing community. It was jointly set up by Dr John “Cloud” Breslin and Tom “DeVore” Murphy when Cloud’s forums were blocked at his college and DeVore provided alternative hosting. The domain name Boards.ie was at the time only possible to obtain by registering a company with the name Boards. This was done by DeVore when he changed the name of his company to Boards Ltd for one day.

The website was originally based on the Ultimate Bulletin Board software, until late in 2001 the site was moved to vBulletin 2. That same year, the site won a Golden Spider award and a Zeddy award. By the end of 2003, boards.ie had almost 18,000 registered members, was transferring 80GB of data per month, and had recently just passed the one million post mark. Only 10 months later, boards.ie had 27,000 members, was transferring 340GB of data per month, and was only 1 month away from passing 2 millon posts.

2004 saw a great deal of change with the upgrading of vBulletin 2 to vBulletin 3 and the addition of a new server. Currently there are three servers operating in a cluster.

Structure

There are over 200 forums which are made easier to navigate to via one of boards.ie’s best features: a dynamic javascript menu which adopts some of USENET’s hierarchy structure (rec, soc etc.) and allows the ability to subscribe to favourite forums.

A new forum can be proposed by anyone but requires a certain amount of support from other members.

It is free to register an account which allows the standard features of vB3 (posting, choosing avatar etc). There are additional features that can be purchased by people who subscribe to boards. This, along with banner advertising, the innovative commercial interaction forums along with donations from users, provides funds towards the operating costs of the community.

Each forum has at least one moderator or super user who keeps the forum on topic and generally keeps the peace. The moderator usually writes a charter for the forum which contains guidelines to users about things that are not acceptable. These include things like flaming, trolling etc.

Moderators can ban users from forums they moderate, and edit threads. Effectively they are local administrators. Only Administrators can globally ban users. Cloud, DeVore, ecksor, Regi and Vexorg are the current administrators and between them they manage the infrastructure of boards servers and things like forum creation, assigning moderators etc.

Boards.ie has an IRC channel known as #boards.ie on the Quakenet IRC network and provides limited feeds to Irish USENET newsgroups.

Culture

Although boards.ie has it’s roots in gaming culture it has grown to such a size that this is now a small part of the overall boards.ie culture. There are many sub-communities within boards which co-exist fairly well.

As with most communities there are some catchphrases and running jokes some of which have been immortalised in the Gathering cards (a tribute/satire on the Magic: The Gathering set of cards.)

There are regular Boards Beers, where regulars on boards go to a pub and usually drink too much. There have been other non-alchohol related events like paintballing and the very successful music event: Boardstock.

Bryght’s FOAF Module for Drupal

Published on 28/10/2004 in Internet and Semantic Web. 0 Comments

Just installed the Drupal 4.5.0 FOAF module by Bryght at rdfs.org. The FOAF download works a treat, but I haven’t explored its FOAFnet capabilities yet.

RSS 1.0 Export for vBJournal

Published on 21/10/2004 in Boards and Semantic Web. 0 Comments

AN-net has recently released vBJournal for vBulletin 3, a useful module that allows users to have blogs (journals) on vB3-based communities. I’ve installed this on boards.jp, and so far so good.

I’ve coded a basic RSS 1.0 (RDF) export for vBJournal, which may still require some tweaking of the item description tags.

Starship Comparisons

Published on 20/10/2004 in Television. 1 Comment

Starship Size Comparison Chart

I know it’s a year or so old, but just got this link from my friend Paul today, and it should be interesting for all sci-fi fans!

TV in Distress

Published on 19/10/2004 in Television. 0 Comments

Flat-screen TV emits international distress signal
Search and rescue operation leads to apartment

EUGENE, Oregon (Reuters) — TV hardly gets much better than this.

An Oregon man discovered earlier this month that his year-old Toshiba Corporation flat-screen TV was emitting an international distress signal picked up by a satellite, leading a search and rescue operation to his apartment in Corvallis, Oregon, 70 miles south of Portland.

The signal from Chris van Rossmann’s TV was routed by satellite to the Air Force Rescue Center at Langley Air Base in Virginia.

Continue reading ‘TV in Distress’

Going to Tom Waits in Amsterdam

Published on 18/10/2004 in Music. 0 Comments

So, faithful side-kicks, stick some Tom Waits on the stereo, unfetter your imaginations, and follow me into the heart of darkness. Believe me, I could use the company!
– Jamie Delano’s “John Constantine/Hellblazer: Original Sins”

We’re off to see Tom Waits play a concert in Amsterdam next month. Really looking forward to it, but buying tickets about two weeks ago was almost impossible. It took nearly two hours to get a single ticket (the official venue website fell over a few minutes before tickets were due to go on sale). Found the Tom Waits Forum extremely helpful as they pointed towards ticketmaster.nl who were also selling tickets. Then tickets were being touted for €300-350 (over three times the original price) within an hour or two :(

Google Desktop Beta

Published on 14/10/2004 in Internet. 1 Comment

Thanks to ecksor for pointing out this one: Google Desktop Beta.

According to their page, it will allow you to:

  • Find your email, files, web history and chats instantly
  • View web pages you’ve seen, even when you’re not online
  • Search as easily as you do on Google

Murdered for His Phone

Published on 13/10/2004 in General. 1 Comment

I’ve become so immune to bad news stories on radio and television that it takes a lot to affect me these days, but the story of the 14-year-old murdered by another youth for his mobile phone really upset me. The comments of the accused were particular chilling - “I wanted to kill someone, someone who no one would care about” - which leads me to believe that stealing the phone was just a poor excuse for this psychopathic act.

Bandwidth Woes

Published on 11/10/2004 in Internet. 3 Comments

I’ve managed to use up my entire 8 GB broadband cap on Esat BT in just 7 days (2nd to 9th October). That means not-much-internet at home for the rest of the month (unless it’s important; I guess you can get a fair few e-mails into a megabyte which is charged at 3c). Okay, perhaps I shouldn’t have downloaded so much stuff, but still it makes you wonder about the virtual monopoly on broadband prices being imposed on us by eircom due to their control of the land line situation. Prices can’t drop because of them, and uncapped or higher capped subscriptions are unmercifully expensive too. What can be done?

Christopher Reeve Dies

Published on 11/10/2004 in Movies and Television. 0 Comments

I was sad to hear this morning that “Superman” actor Christopher Reeve has died aged 52. He had been quite ill for the past few weeks after suffering a cardiac arrest and then falling into a coma.

Reeve also starred in the TV series “Smallville” as Dr. Virgil Swann, and was replaced in a recent episode by his Superman co-star Margot Kidder due to ill health.